Charles should not throw his son to the newshounds

By Susannah Herbert

12:01AM GMT 20 Jan 2002

THERE are certain assets which statesmen have traditionally needed more than the rest of us: a sense of importance, a carrying voice, the ability to switch charm on and off. These days there's another.

Ask Tony Blair, George W Bush, Jack Straw. Ask the Prince of Wales. All authority figures need at least one mildly delinquent child to throw their virtues into higher relief.

The rumpus about Prince Harry, outed last week in the News of the World as a dope-smoking, alcohol-drinking hooray with a loutish streak, has provoked nothing but the warmest of warm feelings towards his father.

Prince Charles, the newspaper declared, has been a "wise and loving dad". His decision to send the Prince to a Peckham rehab centre for a heart-to-heart with the junkies of south London proved him to be "thoughtful and enlightened . . . a shining and enviable example of wisdom among the Windsors".

Now you may believe that the session with heavy-duty heroin addicts was a preposterously inappropriate reaction, a stunt designed mainly to make the Prince of Wales look good by taking a leaf from his late wife's book of image-management.

If Charles really wants to warn his son of the consequences of drink - a far more dangerous and addictive substance than dope - he doesn't need to go south of the river. Tea at great-aunt Margaret's in Kensington Palace would be quite grim enough.

Certainly, it must be deeply irritating for the story's main character - now known colloquially as Harry Pothead - to see how well everyone else involved is doing on the back of his disgrace. It must be bad enough to be cast as Exhibit A in the great national parenthood debate, without having to watch your critics wrap themselves in warm robes of concern and mutual congratulation.

For it's not just Daddy who is earning points for sensitive parenting, but the snoops of the News of the World are too, basking in the acquiescence of the Press Complaints Commission, the industry's self-regulatory watchdog, whose teeth have been entirely drawn by the decision of St James's Palace to co-operate fully with Mr Murdoch's rag.

Far from telling the snoops to f*** off - the average young royal's natural reaction to off-duty scrutiny - it seems that St James's Palace has gone to great pains to cut a sweetheart deal with them.

Damage limitation or midwifery? The two must look pretty similar when your mates are winding you up for being the fall-guy. If only the Prince of Wales and his people had taken as much trouble to manage motherless Harry, keep him occupied and out of harm during the long hot Highgrove summer of 2001, as they have taken to micro-manage his story.

For that is the real problem here. No one wants to say it because it sounds heartless - and it cuts across the official line - but the Prince of Wales does not necessarily emerge from this hoo-hah as "a great father".

If he had been more on the ball at home, or simply more at home, instead of sub-contracting the supervision of his son to minders and staff, there would probably have been no story to manage.

It may be easier for a popular and socially desirable teenager to avoid tea and coffee than to escape contact with drink and drugs but there is nothing inevitable about a 16-year-old getting spectacularly smashed and/or stoned on a regular basis - as seems to have been the case with Harry. It happens because he thinks he can get away with it and reckons the people he respects aren't going to notice or care.

Now, by enlisting the tabloid press as guardians of his younger son's morality, the Prince has compounded his error by subcontracting his parental duties again: this time to a far more observant but far less scrupulous crowd than the old minders.

While worrying about the bad company kept by Harry, Prince Charles is fostering some pretty dodgy short-term alliances of convenience himself. Presumably, he is genuinely worried about his son's "wild" tendencies: but the News of the World just pretends to be worried.

Its concern is adulterated by its thinly disguised longing for another Windsor disaster to cluck over. In this, it is acting like the public at large. I've spoken to dozens on this subject in the past few days but there just aren't many out there who reckon this is an issue of national importance.

I don't know anyone under 40 who regards the tale of Harry and his spliffs with more than wry amusement: "Finding a 16-year-old with drink and dope? About as shocking as finding a panda car with a copper at the wheel" was one reaction I got from a magistrate. If you've ever been to the Notting Hill Carnival and seen just how unconcerned the police are by the spectacle of tens of thousands of Harrys harrying away in broad daylight, you'll know why the nation has greeted the expose with a collective shrug.

Since there is nothing huge about Harry's case from a law-breaking point of view, it is primarily of public interest for its entertainment value, as if the boy were a member of a rock-and-roll dynasty or a film star. Actually, the child of a rock star would have to do a great deal more than drink, smoke dope and behave boorishly before earning so much as a mention in the local paper.

It is here that the humbug begins, with talk of role models and public figures and the need to "set an example". But this isn't an age of cap-doffing deference, in which the masses slavishly imitate those who used to be called their "betters". If that age ever existed, its assumptions have been reversed.

The top layer are never more popular than when they supply us with cautionary tales, screw up and re-enact the most consoling fable in the book, the one which proclaims that there is no such thing as having it all and that a drug habit is nature's way of saying you have too much money.

There is a logic at play here - for in a certain milieu, the world where the word "estate" means rolling acres, not just a set of wheels or a cul-de-sac of executive houses, the only one-upmanship you can ever really secure over your neighbours and peers concerns the way your children have turned out. Princess Michael of Kent, the Palmer-Tompkinsons and Mrs Parker Bowles are more or less level-pegging it at the moment, with the Prince of Wales still just behind - but with every chance of catching up, if his new minders get all they crave.

What do you give the man who has everything? A delinquent child - and the full attention of the News of the World.